Yates Revives, Revises Chihara’s Guitar Concerto

Writing a guitar concerto is tricky business, particularly for a nonguitarist.American composer Paul Chihara made his effectively musing but not entirely idiomatic contribution to this not-at-all crowded field in 1974. When Peter Yates revived it, Tuesday at Schoenberg Hall with the UCLA Philharmonia Orchestra under music director Jon Robertson, it was with his own, composer-sanctioned revisions to the solo part.

Chihara composed his Guitar Concerto for Pepe Romero and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, back in the heady days of Neville Marriner’s directorate. Its odd mix of free atonality, luscious sound washes, jazz and Iberian cliches, and ghostly quotations made it postmodern before its time. It has worn reasonably well--it’s been hardly used, after all--and offers modestly grateful work for a particularly lucid fret-board dreamer.

Yates, a faculty member at UCLA, is such a guitarist. An unreconstructed modernist, he is also sensitive to vernacular and popular styles, and he made much of the revamped solo part, which now includes his own stylistically acute and integrated cadenzas for the outer movements.

His amplification was not always flattering, but within its harsh limits he played with great attention to color and point.

Robertson and a scaled-back Philharmonia accompanied Yates carefully and, in the last movement, with a bit of panache. The enigmatic ending--ironic kiss-off or gentle farewell?--seemed miscalculated by all, but otherwise this proved a substantial and satisfying reading.

Robertson surrounded the concerto with brightly colored, energetic pieces displaying a host of accomplished wind soloists within the ensemble. Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber” almost stalled at the beginning of the Scherzo, but grew from there in confidence and focused vigor.

A few misguided and faltering solos aside, Ravel’s “Bolero” also had its full measure of sinuous sass and swagger.